3 comments:

Jake
said...

Paul Krugman, a Keynesian economist, reviewed bitcoin saying that "[bitcoin] has fluctuated sharply, but overall it has soared. So buying into [bitcoin] has, at least so far, been a good investment. But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in [bitcoin]." Money as a commodity in other words, not much of an improvement.

well, the argument will be yes, but they need to spend their bitoins so now the goods and services will develop to service them, after all bitcoin maybe hipster gold to some degree but it is already a viable medium of exchange and will no doubt be increasingly used as such in a way that gold isn't. My concern is less that than the idea that bitcoin is somehow anti-capitalist just because it is not issued by a central bank or that electronic currencies won't/cant tend toward private monopoly and won't primarily enrich first in the door speculators. Although coding as anti-capitalist or radical seems to be the way the next generation of capitalists generally get hyped anyway. Hedging your wealth against inflation is handy if you have got some wealth, what if all you have is debts? I sincerely hope that in a year or twos time i am going to have to sit around listening to people boast about how well their e-currency portfolios are doing, and how smart they were to get in at the start of the bubble just like I had to with housing throughout the 00s.

I don't have any debts and I even have a bit of capital and am creditworthy so this isn't, I should add, sour grapes from someone who can't take advantage of it all etc..

Bitcoin becoming a 'thing' is the best thing. Don't know about anticapitalist like, about a year ago the bitcoin forums were a Randian spawning ground for nerd libertarians and conmen.

The mechanics of it are that to get an actually profitable mining rig you needed to invest in a shit load of graphics cards/cooling systems, so purely in utility bill terms mining nerd dollars would maybe just squeeze into profitability.